


Hunger

by hangingfire



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Historical, M/M, Off-screen Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21799480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/pseuds/hangingfire
Summary: A history of the desires of Harry Duncan Spens Goodsir.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Commander James Fitzjames & Harry D. S. Goodsir, Harry D. S. Goodsir & Cornelius Hickey, Harry D. S. Goodsir & Lady Silence | Silna
Comments: 25
Kudos: 47
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Hunger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fabulous_but_evil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabulous_but_evil/gifts).



> _When the crustacean does throw off a limb voluntarily, it will be found on examination that this is always effected at one spot only, near to the basal extremity of the first phalanx. This part of the phalanx is very much contracted for the length of half an inch, or a little more, in the common edible crab. [...]_
> 
> _By dissection this line can be traced into the substance of the organ of reproduction, and is found in this way to be the exact spot where the limb is generally thrown off. Through the long axis of this, and near one edge, a small foramen exists for the transmission of the blood-vessels and nerve. The microscopic structure of this gland or organ is extremely beautiful._
> 
> —Excerpt from "The Mode of Reproduction of Lost Parts in the Crustacea" by Harry D. S. Goodsir, published in [_Anatomical and Pathological Observations_. Edinburgh: Myles MacPhail, 1845](https://books.google.com/books?id=-ZVkAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP5#v=onepage&q&f=false)

* * *

**_Food_ **

Once, when Harry Goodsir was a boy of no more than seven and his eldest brother John twelve, they went down to the shore to see a dead fisherman being pulled out of the water.

The boat had sunk the previous day in foul weather, and one of the townspeople had spotted the corpse drifting in toward the rocks along the shore. By the time the other fishermen reached it, the body had lain for some time in a tide-pool. When they dragged the body out, for a moment Harry thought that it was wearing some sort of scaly coat, and then he realized the body was covered with crabs, some the size of a sovereign, others bigger than a man's hand. The fishermen swore, hurling them away by the handful and cursing even more when the crabs nipped at them, until the ragged corpse lay bare and small under the grey sky. The men wrapped it in oilcloth and bore it away.

Three days later, the cook made some sort of stew for dinner, a hotchpotch of fish and mussels and crab. Harry stared at pale flakes of meat in the light brown broth and wondered if they had come from one of the crabs that fed on the fisherman's flesh. He plucked a claw out of the dish and wondered if it had ripped at the man's skin.

"Harry," his mother said gently. "Is something wrong?"

Harry looked up at met John's gaze across the table. His brother had a spoonful of crabmeat halfway between the dish and his mouth; he raised his eyebrows and gave a barely perceptible shrug.

"No, mother," Harry said quietly. He put the claw down on the edge of his plate. He picked up his own spoon. He ate.

* * *

**_Knowledge_ **

Dr. Knox had a skull on his desk. Some of the students whispered that it was the mortal remains of one of the poor victims that the notorious resurrectionist-murderers Burke and Hare had brought to Knox's door back in 1828. John told Harry to pay those whispers no mind, for Knox was a good man and a good teacher and Harry would do well to go easy and learn from him. And indeed Harry learned well, and he mostly ignored the whispers.

Sometimes when he went to see Knox in his rooms, he found himself idle, waiting. And he would pick up the skull, running his fingers over the dome of it. Did this protrusion of the frontal bone indeed suggest the benevolence of the individual, or does that parietal concavity indicate a cunning nature? How far might a man might go in the advancement of science (the advancement of himself, he sometimes admitted)? Not murder, of course—a bridge too, too far. But what bargains might one strike, what deeds might one look away from, if it meant a discovery for the betterment of all mankind?

These thoughts made Harry nervous. He never brought them up to Knox, nor his brother, nor to anyone else. He completed his dissections, he received his licentiate. He went to work.

* * *

**_Friendship_ **

For the first several days at sea, Harry thought the sudden, unanticipated loneliness might well be the death of him. He was tongue-tied at dinner amongst the officers, all experienced Navy men speaking a language that might as well have been Chinese for all he understood the talk of _foc'sles_ and _mainbraces_ and _pitch_. He developed a mild loathing of his superior, Dr. Stanley, whose blend of arrogance, indolence, and ignorance was nearly impossible to meet with grace. And while the sailors respected the need for a surgeon, they seemed to a man to find him soft, and Harry wasn't sure he disagreed.

So he turned to his work, and as they ventured further into the Atlantic, he got out his nets and began casting them into the ocean to see what he could find. And what things he drew up! The most beautiful cod he had ever seen, slender crustaceans, great lion's-mane jellyfish. And to his surprise, the officers and several sailors began to take an interest in what he was finding; it was as if his own enthusiasm for the creatures of the sea inspired theirs. Soon they were helping him with the nets and asking him what this creature was and that, and jostling for a chance to look at the animalcules—some like tiny shrimp, others like stars or lace—under the microscope.

"Mr. Goodsir, has that pencil of yours even got a point?" Commander Fitzjames asked jovially, peering over his shoulder as he sketched out the insides of a handsome _Liparis_. "I can scarcely see it, it's finer than a hair."

Harry laughed at that, and felt suddenly at ease, and that perhaps this expedition was going to be quite all right after all.

* * *

**_Love_ **

He and the Lady Silence never met without an officer within earshot, if not looking directly upon them, but that didn't stop the sailors from gossiping about his closeness with her, giving him sidelong glances when he went below, and making rude remarks about the nature of an Esquimaux woman's private parts when they thought he wasn't listening. Or perhaps, he thought irritably, they knew damned well he was listening.

 _They can have their gossip and be hanged for it for all I care_ , he decided. _If it keeps them entertained and stops them being bored and discontented, I suppose I'm doing everyone a favour._

She didn't speak to him the first time he brought her dinner, nor the second, but the third, she pointed to her slice of salt pork and spoke a word. A few gestures and hasty drawings later, he realised that she had given him the word for _fat_ or _blubber_ , and he somehow made it clear that the pale chewy slab on her plate was the preserved fat and meat of a pig. He drew her a picture of a pig in a farmyard, and that was the first time she smiled at him.

More words came after that— _snow_ and _ice_ and _whale_ and _caribou_. The words for the moods of the sky and the sea, and for men and women and children. Some weeks went by; then he missed a day seeing her, his presence being required to attend to an injured sailor. When he saw her the next day, she rose to greet him by putting her hands on her shoulders, indicating that he was to bend down toward her. He thought for one startled and slightly terrified moment that she was going to kiss him, but instead she pressed her nose against his cheek, and he felt her warm breath stir his hair. " _Kunik_ ," she said. A greeting for family, she explained. For loved ones.

Later, before he left, she pointed to herself in an imitation of the gestures he'd made when he'd first brought her dinner. "Silna," she said, quietly, pitched just for his ears alone.

"Silna," he repeated, and he never said it again, not where anyone else could hear. He kept her name the way a woman might keep a locket, secret, close to his heart.

* * *

**_Sex_ **

Harry was observant in the way only quiet, unassuming men can be. Of course, with much of the health of the men of _Erebus_ in his hands (Dr. Stanley being off in his cabin reading, more often than not), he knew who had venereal afflictions, and if a new case were to appear seemingly out of nowhere, despite the last doxy being over eighteen months in the past, well—Harry would treat the ailment and say nothing.

When he found himself the expedition's sole surgeon after the Carnivale, he began dividing his time between _Erebus_ and _Terror_ , the better to see to matters across both crews. Often when he went to _Terror_ , Commander Fitzjames would accompany him, and Harry could not miss that he and Captain Crozier were often shut up in _Terror_ 's great cabin for hours at a time, the other officers being occupied elsewhere. It was a fact largely unworthy of comment, for surely the expedition's leaders had much to say to one another in private, but Harry was fairly certain that a soft, half-agonised cry of _Francis_ or a tender murmur of _James_ were not entirely germane to the overall well-being of Erebites or Terrors. Still, it did no one harm either, and when he returned to _Erebus_ in Fitzjames's company, he would talk about anything except what he might or might not have overheard.

Meanwhile, Cornelius Hickey appeared to take his disdain as a challenge—"I fear a scar's reopened, Mr. Goodsir, perhaps you could take a look?" Harry took to humouring him occasionally, though after a certain point there was not even a hint of red to the scars that crisscrossed his pale buttocks. After one lascivious wiggle more than he could tolerate, Harry stopped taking his requests altogether and simply began ignoring him. Hickey was insulting, he was irritating, and worse, his impudence occasionally made Harry want to _do_ something with the body bent over the examination table that he, Harry, was unwilling to admit even to himself in the privacy of his own bed. And it wasn't even the perversity of it that shamed him—it was that he knew such an act would be driven by hate, and regardless of what he resented his body for wanting, his conscience could not abide that.

* * *

**_Fame_ **

There is another world where Harry Goodsir survives.

A whaler spots a hunting party on the shore of King William Land. Or the Admiralty sends a search expedition a full year sooner, and they come upon the Terror Camp, a camp as yet unriven by conflict, not yet attacked by the great bear. Or the caribou are plentiful, or the winter not unusually harsh and the summer not without a thaw.

Harry Goodsir is a good man, a kind man, a compassionate man. He is also ambitious and driven and determined to leave his stamp on the world.

Safe again at his father's house in Largo, he writes _On the Absorption of Lead by the Human Body._ He publishes Lt. Graham Gore's delicate illustrations of _Cyclopterus_ and dedicates his papers to the man's memory. He publishes _On the Grammar and Orthography of Inooktitut, the Language of the Esquimaux People_.

What he does not do is publish a single word about the great spirit bear, the _Tuunbaq_. Not even in the ethnography that will later be grudgingly admired and partly derided by Rasmussen and others does he so much as hint at the existence of such a thing, either as a reality or as a myth. He keeps his silence for Silna's sake, and for his own.

He lives a long, distinguished life, and if some of his discoveries and writings are later overshadowed, corrected, or superseded, he nevertheless has a portrait in the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and his name and accomplishments are entered into the annals of the Royal Society. Nearly a century later, a descendant sorting through his papers discovers the secret narrative of the spirit that dressed in flesh, how it stalked Sir John Franklin's men and killed the great explorer himself.

The narrative is burned. There are things for which a man need not be remembered.

* * *

**_Home_ **

Harry Goodsir barely sleeps for the aches in his joints, and he barely eats for the weakness of his teeth. Scotland and England seem scarcely to exist anymore; there are only the stones that they drag themselves over every day, the pitiless sky, the gnawing hunger, the pain.

When he does sleep, he dreams of the plants that he and his sister would forage for along the coast and in the hedges. Oysterplants, sea buckthorn, blaeberries, sloes. He dreams of the slender stems of mushrooms and the ruddy feathers of dulse. He dreams of the skin of a wild cherry bursting between his teeth.

He dreams of the shore at Anstruther, of reaching into a tide pool and plucking up mussels and clams. He dreams of tiny silvery fish.

He dreams of small brown crabs.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to: the _Terror_ fandom on Tumblr and Discord and to the Remembering the Franklin Expedition FB group for hooking a girl up for the last year and a half with tons of reference material and primary sources for all of the Franklin Expedition in general and Harry D. S. Goodsir in particular; my betas Tri and Snickfic; and to fabulous_but_evil for their request. Happy Yuletide!


End file.
